Whether the cause is climate-related disaster in the US and abroad, the extreme heat across much of the nation this summer, or perhaps some sort of backlash at the utterly moronic attitudes, expressed incomprehensibly (here's looking at you Rick Perry, citing Galileo) of all but one of the Republican presidential hopefuls about climate change, a new Reuters/Ipsos poll shows nearly 10% more Americans believe the world is actually warming than did so last year. According to this new poll 83% of Americans believe Earth is in fact warming. Last year 75% of people thought so.

Despite the impression that the Republican debates may give, nearly two-thirds of self-identified Republicans believe that the climate is warming (72%)--92% of Democrats do.

Of course just because you accept that the planet is warming doesn't mean you believe human activity is causing it. But the new poll found that 71% of Americans believe humans are either mostly or partly causing the observed warming; 27% of Americans believe humans have nothing to do with it.

So who do the Republican candidates believe they are representing in their climate denial? Surely not their constituents.

And I have to say that I have to wonder why Democrats seem to insist taking action on climate is a non-starter when the numbers of people are so skewed towards believing the climate is in fact changing and humans are to blame.

It also makes me wonder who Al Gore's 25 hours of Climate Reality was aimed at. After all, as this poll shows it's not really the US citizenry (still less people in pretty much every other nation in the world) that need convincing. It's politicians, beholden to status quo polluting industry, that need a kick in the arse.